THE SHARK STRIPPED BARE
“NORMAN BESTRODE THE FAIRWAYS LIKE A GUNSLINGER, HIS GAME AS BIG AS HIS STYLE WAS BOLD”
IT’S 9.30 on a Wednesday morning in Florida and the Australian-American accent is coming through rich and strong from one of the humbler nooks of a grand estate. “I’m in my work room down below, where I still have golf clubs that I used to tinker with all the time. You know, it’s great to see what the kids can do today. But back in the day our clubs were so heavy, and for us to generate the clubhead speed that we did was just mindblowingly impressive.”
A manly dexterity. A certain wistfulness. Fatherly feelings for the champions of today. And a bit of a brag. Yep, in case there was any doubt, that can only be the Shark on the other end of the line. And I’ll be honest: even for a seasoned – some might say jaded – sports hack, it’s a tell-your-mates thrill to have him there.
If Greg Norman’s heyday predates you, know this: it’s hard to overstate how big a deal he was in the 1980s and ’90s. The No. 1 golfer in the world for 331 weeks, Norman won 90 tournaments as a professional, including the Open Championships of 1986 and 1993. The first player to reach $10 million in prize money, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2001.
But numbers don’t do justice to the Norman phenomenon any better than notes on a page capture the force of a masterful symphony. For a quarter-century Norman’s magnetism pulled legions of sports fans out of their beds and in front of their televisions to rise and fall through his latest quest for one of the major titles that proved so elusive. Blond and suntanned with ice-blue eyes, sporting the wide-shouldered, slim-waisted physique of an Olympic gymnast at a time when most leading golfers could have been mistaken for accountants or truck drivers, Norman bestrode the fairways like a gunslinger, his game as big as his style was bold. Only Arnold Palmer before him and Tiger Woods since have made golf so enticing for so many.
His return of two major titles (Woods has 15; the GOAT, Jack Nicklaus, 18) is a wholly misleading reflection of his outsized talent and influence. And yet his history of near-misses – he had eight runner-up and 30 top-10 finishes in majors – allowed him to show arguably the defining feature of his competitive being: an unsurpassed dignity and magnanimity in defeat. Of the many things you could borrow from the Shark, that might just be the most uplifting.
As great a player as he was, Norman has found
